1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates, in general, to information handling systems, and more particularly, to an information handling system that may provide host information to target devices behind an appliance in multi SCSI transport protocols.
2. Background of the Related Art
An information handling system generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes thereby allowing a user to take advantage of the value of the information. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements vary between different users or applications, information handling systems may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in information handling systems allow for information handling systems to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, information handling systems may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
When a host computer having a SCSI parallel interface sends a SCSI command, data, and status to a storage device having a SCSI parallel interface, the Input/Output (I/O) occurs over the SCSI bus without a need of transport protocol. When the two interfaces are not SCSI however, the SCSI command, data messages, and status are sent and received through an interface such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, Infiniband, or Serial Attached SCSI. In these cases the physical interfaces are not SCSI. However, since these interfaces may be considered SCSI “talk devices” the transport protocol of the respective physical interface is used. The SCSI information is encapsulated in a frame or packet. In a multi protocol host environment, a large number of hosts implementing various Input/Output (I/O) protocol may share a storage device through a Multi Protocol Network Switch and a Multi Protocol Appliance. Other example appliances include bridges, gateways, routers, expanders, and switches.
An appliance may translate a packet or a frame from a non-SCSI physical interface initiator (host) interface. The encapsulated SCSI information may be command, data, and status, or other variations. An appliance will strip off the information in the packet or frame and will only send the SCSI command, data, status to the target shared storage device. Hence, the host information will be lost between the appliance and the SCSI physical interface storage device. An analyzer at a SCSI layer will not present the host information such as its physical or logical address. Consequently, identifying and associating the SCSI information to the initiating host at the SCSI layer is problematic. Debugging at the SCSI layer without obtaining information about the issuing host may be inefficient. Debugging may require an analyzer for each transport protocol placed within the respective transport link. This can be expensive, inefficient, and time consuming in a multi-host and/or multi-target configuration where number of hosts can be numerous.